ERICA
Chapter playlist:
Don't Blame Me — Taylor Swift
Why does this feel like getting stabbed with my own knife?
I watch Jeremiah cross the courtyard, tux jacket over one shoulder, until he’s no longer lit by the string lights and the dark of the hallway swallows him whole.
Every part of me wants to run after him. Grab his sleeve. Tell him I was kidding, that none of it is true, that I’m a raging lunatic with a flair for the dramatic and nothing more.
I don’t, and now my heart feels like a deflated balloon.
I give myself a few minutes to gather the courage it takes not to do something rash, then I find the garden entrance that lets guests slip straight out to the street without passing the lobby.
I duck through before anyone official can ask why a woman in a ball gown is leaving alone.
I hike my skirt to my knees and start walking. In this dress. In these boots.
I make it to the end of the block before a man with salt and pepper hair plants himself at the crosswalk like he’s been waiting there just for me.
I jump back, startled, wondering if I’d need to put these combat boots to use.
“Erica Armitage,” he says. “We need to talk.”
My stomach plummets through the sidewalk. A cop? Museum security? Somebody from the hotel who’s onto me? I run through every option in a half second and none of them end anywhere good. I picture the jumpsuit. I have never once looked good in the color orange.
“Who the blazes are you?”
“Someone whose interests are temporarily aligned with yours.” He holds a card out between two fingers. “Call me.”
Then he presses it into my palm and closes my fingers around it like some kind of magician.
The light changes and he’s gone before I can ask any questions.
I look down. The card is heavy stock with embossed letters.
HEATH KANE
Perfect. Exactly what tonight needed. A new guy I have to deal with.
I tuck it into the top of my boot and keep walking. Whatever this is, it can wait until I’ve met with the rest of the crew.
By the time I let myself into the loft, everyone is in various stages of packing up.
Suri already has the loupe in her eye, hunched over the velvet case on the worktable.
“Something’s wrong,” she says, before I’ve even had a chance to change out of my dress.
I lean over her shoulder. To me, it looks perfect. But I’m not the expert here.
Suri turns it under the lamp, frowning. “The weight’s wrong.” She hefts it in her palm like she’s weighing a peach. “And look at this clasp. The forger got maybe eighty percent of the way and just ran out of patience.”
She looks up at me.
“Whoever did this didn't try very hard,” she says. “Part of it is 3-D printed, for Pete's sake.”
Blood rushes to my head. “You mean it’s a FAKE? We just swapped a fake for another… crappier fake?”
“Are you FREAKING kidding me?” Rue cries.
Suri presses the loupe back to her eye and goes quiet for a long moment.
“Interesting,” she says.
“What?” Ginger leans in. “What’s interesting?”
Suri doesn’t answer. She turns the necklace another few degrees under the lamp.
“Huh.”
“What do you mean, huh?” Rue’s voice climbs half an octave. “Suri, tell us already.”
Suri holds up one finger, the universal sign for wait, and keeps staring into the clasp. “Is this some kind of joke?”
“Is what a joke?” My patience has officially left the building.
Suri finally lowers the loupe and looks up at the whole room. “There’s an engraving inside the clasp. The letters are so small you’d need a microscope to catch them without this thing.” She taps the loupe against her palm.
“What does it say?” Tanya asks.
Suri reads it out loud, “The Jackdaw sends regards.”
All our jaws drop in unison.
Rue is truly offended now. “Have we just been given the middle finger… from a playing card?”
Ginger drops onto the lumpy sofa. “Now what? We have no leverage.”
“Hobbs doesn’t know that,” Zoe says.
“Unless Hobbs is the Jackdaw,” Rue says. She’s looking around at every one of us, clearly confused why we’re not losing our cool, tossing chairs into the wall. I tend to be calm under pressure, but that doesn’t mean I’m not raging inside.
Ivy crosses her arms. “Doubtful.”
“This is bad,” Tanya says. “Very, very bad.”
Rue throws her hands in the air. “I can’t believe this.”
The whole room goes silent. All this planning. All these months. Years for me. And we lifted a fake.
Finally, Zoe says, “Erica, your call.”
Every head in the room turns toward me at once. I want to disappear into the floorboards.
“We continue with the plan,” I say. “I’ll pay Sal a visit. Maybe he knows something about this Jackdaw person.”
“Or persons,” Tanya says. “Could be a gang.”
Dale perks up from the corner where he’s been quietly watching this unfold. “Like The Italian Job. I love that movie.” He frowns. “Sadly, I don’t fit into a Mini Cooper.”
“In the meantime,” I say. “We’re sitting on hot goods. Zoe, how long do we have before the Argentinians catch on?”
“Two days max. Realistically, more like twelve hours.”
“That doesn’t leave us much time.”
“They’ll keep it quiet,” Ginger says. “And not get the authorities involved. Remember, they’ve been holding onto it illegally and won’t want to draw attention.”
“Yeah,” Ivy says. “But they know people in this town. The kind that can make someone disappear.”
Nobody needs me to spell out what kind of people she’s talking about.
“Okay, Ginger.” I turn to her. “Are you ready to fence some goodies?”
She cracks her knuckles. “Bring it on.”
That’s when the back gate rattles and Dale wheels in the housekeeping cart from the van he’d parked in the back alley.
“Who wants to do the honors?” I ask.
Everybody looks at everybody else. Nobody moves.
“I think Suri should do it,” Ginger says. “She’s the one who almost got blown up in the vault.”
“That’s not what happened,” Suri says, already reaching for the latch. “But I appreciate the sentiment.”
Suri crouches at the cart and comes up with something flat, a thin sandwich of foam board and glassine paper taped shut like a shipping envelope. She peels back the tape with two fingers, the paper crackling free. Everybody gasps at once.
“Is that—?” Ivy starts.
“Oh my Lanta,” Tanya says.
“Raphael’s Portrait of a Young Man!” Ginger’s voice wobbles on the last word.
“That’s not a fake too, is it?” Rue asks, a little skeptical now.
The whole room goes reverent. Ginger takes it from Suri with both hands like it’s made of eggshells, turning it toward the light, running her thumb along the raw edge of the board without ever touching the paint itself.
“I’d need forensic tests,” she says. “But I’m like ninety-five percent certain this is the real deal.”
Nobody says anything for a second. This painting’s been missing since the Nazis stripped it out of a Polish collection in 1939.
It’s right up there with the Amber Room panels and a Dürer drawing nobody’s laid eyes on in eighty years.
There are hundreds of thousands of artworks still unaccounted for, and here we are, standing around a piece of history lost since World War Two.
Two more come out of the cart the same way, flattened and taped like contraband cheese. One of them, Ginger says, is Bosschaert, a still life last seen before the war ever started.
The third one is a floral still life. I wouldn’t be able to pick it out of a lineup, but Ginger looks like she’s about to pee her pants.
She turns it over, checks the back, checks it again. Steps back, and shakes her head in disbelief.
“Mignon,” she finally says. “Abraham Mignon. This one’s been at the top of a restitution list for years. Someone thought they saw it on a real estate listing a few years ago. They were able to recover one painting after putting the family on house arrest.”
She sets it down like it might bruise. “When the Argentine police finally raided the place, this one was already gone.”
She looks at all three paintings, then up at me. “You’re going to have two very peeved German-Argentinians on your hands.”
“Not if you fence them first,” I say.
“They’ll sit for a hot minute in the basement of my gallery,” Ginger says.
“I trust you,” I tell her.
She’ll know how to get them off her hands when she returns to New York.
Once the paintings are stacked against the wall, Suri reaches into the cart and goes quiet.
She lifts out a leather attaché case and sets it on the worktable. When she opens it, there are thirty to fifty folded paper parcels. She gently taps the paper so the diamonds slide into a neat line onto the velvet fabric she’d rolled out.
Suri is silent for a solid ten seconds. She holds one stone up between two fingers. Then another. Then a third. Nobody interrupts her. This is Suri’s Super Bowl and every one of us knows it.
She finally surfaces enough to string a sentence together. “Magnificent,” she says, still not looking up. Her hands are actually shaking. “Do you understand what this is?”
“The Ommeren cache,” I say, and I let that sit for a second.
Ginger and Ivy both look at me with their eyes wide. But it doesn’t ring a bell for the rest of the crew.
“It’s basically Nazi buried treasure,” I explain succinctly.
“Like… a pirate map? With X marks the spot and everything?” Tanya asks.
“I mean… sure.”
“So how’d you find it?” Rue asks.
“I traced it to our friends in Argentina.” I don’t elaborate on how many nights that cost me. “Along with the Ommeren loot, I also stumbled upon investment stones and statement jewels, probably acquired in shady transactions over the years.”
Rue whistles low. “So we just stole from Hitler.”
“Not really. Hitler wasn’t a diamond guy. Just a garden-variety psychopath.“
“You can say that again,” Suri says, not looking up from the loupe.
“My hands are sweaty already,” Ginger says, flexing her fingers.
“When will you go to Tel Aviv?” I ask her.
“In about a month.”
Suri turns one of the stones between two fingers, studying it. “Seems a shame to cut these down.”
Tanya says what everyone is thinking. “I feel weird about this.”
Zoe levels her with a look. “It’s ninety-nine million dollars in diamonds. You’re not supposed to feel like Gandhi.”